In many instances, it is important to assign a confirmed, certifiable and non-alterable date to a critical document or work Inherent in such efforts is the need to describe the accuracy, once the criteria for such dating is settled upon, careful documentation of a work demands a high level of specificity and detail in identifying the content of the work that is to be documented. At times, unique problems arise from the desire to provide careful documentation of a work as its undergoes continuing evolution. In such instances, minute changes can become buried in a torrent of ongoing revisions and additions, and it may not be known at the time, what versions of a work will have significance in the future.
There is an obvious need to share documents within and between entities in a secure and time-verified manner. There could be innumerable reasons for the sharing of documents between entities, but two prominent reasons are for the verification of actions and the settling of disputes. Entities could be individuals, businesses, departments or individuals within a business, government agencies, or any type of organization.
There are currently various methods whereby the contents of a document can be verified at a specific time. For example, when an entity files a document with a government agency, or when a document is faxed or emailed from one entity to another or when a document is physically received. These methods meet specific needs at certain times, but they are inefficient and unsuitable for general use, corporate use, government use, The government is not in the business of verifying documents and dates to third-parties; faxing can result in poor quality reproductions and incorrect timestamps; and fax and email timestamps can also be tampered with, and it is not desirable to email sensitive documents over a public network, and the recipient comes into possession of a document that could be edited and then forwarded as genuine.
When a document is shared between parties, the receiving party can only be certain of the state of the document at that point in time, unless there is an independent, trusted third-party verification of the state of the document at a prior point in time. The broad-based use of digital documents, combined with the availability of software tools that allow the editing and manipulation of digital documents, increase the possibility of tampering and forgery of documents, which creates risk for the receiving party. The system time of computers can be manually re-set, or manipulated causing a false create or modification date to display. Furthermore, with ad hoc methods such as faxing or email document submission, there are additional problems, for example: keeping track of document versions with these methods is prone to human error; also, keeping track of who has access to the documents, in other words, who received copies of all versions of all shared documents, and who those recipients shared the documents with, is administratively very problematic.
There is clearly a need for an automated process that enables entities to securely share time-verified content, audit content and actions on the content on a selective basis.